Abū ‘Amr ‘Uthman Ibn al-Nābulusī


‘Alā’ al-Dīn Abū ‘Amr ‘Uthman ibn Ibrahīm ibn Khālid al-Qurashī Ibn al-Nābulusī was an administrator in Ayyubid Egypt. He is most noted today for producing the most detailed surviving fiscal record of any part of the rural medieval Arab world.

Life

In early life, al-Nābulusī trained as a religious scholar. But he became a civil servant under the Ayyubid sultan al-Kāmil, and by the late 1220s was one of the Sultan's right-hand men, serving as his chief financial advisor. However, in 1237, he fell from grace. He was imprisoned for a month and his family home expropriated and sold, after which he appears to have retired into producing works of literature: it is thought that his writings date from after 1238. In 1245, however, al-Kāmil's successor, al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ, commanded al-Nābulusī to audit the agricultural production of the Fayyum region of Egypt, whose productivity had fallen, and which al-Malik al-Ṣāliḥ wished to increase. Al-Nābulusī spent two months of the spring of 1245 touring the region, gathering the information on tax obligations pertaining to the previous year and abetting it with his own observations. He visited around 125 settlements, and his record of the visit is the most detailed surviving fiscal record from the medieval Arab world. Nothing more about al-Nābulusi's life is known except that he died on 17 April 1262 and was buried in the cemetery of Muqattam.

Works